Steve Kemp: Removing my last server?
https://blog.steve.fi/removing_my_last_server_.html
February 5, 2022, 5:45 AM
In the past I used to run a number of virtual machines, or dedicated hosts. Currently I'm cut things down to only a single machine which I'm planning to remove.
Email
Email used to be hosted via dovecot, and then read with mutt-ng on the host itself. Later I moved to reading mail with my own console-based email client.
Eventually I succumbed, and now I pay for Google's Workspace product.
Git Repositories
I used to use gitbucket for hosting a bunch of (mostly private) git repositories. A ...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: corels 0.0.4 on CRAN: M1 Update
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/02/04#corels_0.0.4
February 5, 2022, 12:26 AM
An updated version of the corels package is now on CRAN! The ‘Certifiably Optimal RulE ListS (Corels)’ learner provides interpretable decision rules with an optimality guarantee.
The change is (just like the previous one) chiefly an update to configure.ac in order to ensure R on M1 macOS finds the locally-added GNU GMP. Our thanks to the infatiguable Brian Ripley for the heads-up even containing the two needed assignments to LD and CPPFLAGS..
If you like this or other open-source work I do, ...
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Louis-Philippe Véronneau: Migrating from ledger to hledger
https://veronneau.org/migrating-from-ledger-to-hledger.html
February 4, 2022, 9:15 PM
I first started using ledger — the original plain-text accounting
software — in 2017. Since then, I had been pretty happy with my
accounting routine, but grew a little annoyed by the repetitive manual work I
had to do to assign recurring transactions to the right account.
To make things easier, I had a collection of bash scripts to parse and convert
the CSV files from my bank's website1 into ledger entries. They were of
course ugly, unreadable piles of sed-grep-regex and did not let met achi...
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Ian Jackson: EUDCC QR codes vs NHS “Travel” barcodes vs TAC Verify
https://diziet.dreamwidth.org/10886.html
February 4, 2022, 7:43 PM
The EU Digital Covid Certificate scheme is a format for (digitally signed) vaccination status certificates. Not only EU countries participate - the UK is now a participant in this scheme.
I am currently on my way to go skiing in the French Alps. So I needed a certificate that would be accepted in France. AFAICT the official way to do this is to get the “international” certificate from the NHS, and take it to a French pharmacy who will convert it into something suitably French. (AIUI the NHS ...
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Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 203 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-203-released/
February 4, 2022, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 203. This version includes the following changes:
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Improve documentation for --timeout due to a few misconceptions.
Add an allowed-to-fail test regarding a regression in directory handling.
* Tidy control flow in Difference._reverse_self a little.
[ Alyssa Ross ]
* Fix diffing CBFS names that contain spaces.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
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Sven Hoexter: Suntime Calculation with Lua and the Great Gift of Open Source
http://sven.stormbind.net/blog/posts/misc_suntime_calc_lua_and_greatfulness_of_oss/
February 3, 2022, 8:11 PM
tl;dr I ported a part of the python-suntime library to Lua to use it on OpenWRT and
RutOS powered devices.
suntime.lua
There are those unremarkable things which let you pause for
a moment, and realize what a great gift of our time open source software
and open knowledge is. At some point in time someone figured out
how to calculate the sunrise and sunset time on the current date for
your location. Someone else wrote that up and probably again a different
person published it on the internet. Th...
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Norbert Preining: Mechanical keyboards: Pulsar PCMK
https://www.preining.info/blog/2022/02/mechanical-keyboards-pulsar-pcmk/
February 2, 2022, 1:07 PM
Mechanical keyboards – the big fat rabbit hole you can disappear … I started using mechanical keyboards about a year ago, with a Drevo Blademaster Pro (review coming up), but recently got a Pulsar PCML TKL keyboard in a build-it-yourself order.
The Drevo Blademaster Pro I am using is great, but doesn’t allow changing switches at all. So I was contemplating getting a mechanical keyboard that allows for arbitrary switches. My biggest problem here is that I am used to the Japanese JIS layout...
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Ben Hutchings: CI for the Debian kernel team
https://www.decadent.org.uk/ben/blog/ci-for-the-debian-kernel-team.html
February 2, 2022, 1:13 AM
Starting just after Christmas, I have been working on CI for all
the kernel team's packages on Salsa. The salsa-ci-team has done
great work on producing a common pipeline that is usable for most
packages with minimal configuration. However, for some packages
a lot more work was required.
Linux
I started with the most important
package, linux
itself. This now has about 1.1 GiB of source spread over 76,000
source files. That turns out to be a
problem
for the pipeline whic...
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Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, January 2022
https://www.decadent.org.uk/ben/blog/debian-lts-work-january-2022.html
February 1, 2022, 11:44 PM
In January I was assigned 24 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS
initiative. I worked 16 hours, and will carry over the remaining
time to February.
I sent various backported security fixes for Linux to the stable
mailing list, and they have been included in subsequent stable
releases. I rebased the linux package on the latest 4.9-stable
release, but did not yet upload it....
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Jonathan Dowland: Amateur archiving activities, January 2022
https://jmtd.net/log/archiving_jan_2022/
February 1, 2022, 9:01 PM
I have a backlog of digital stuff to upload to
archive.org that I'm finally starting to flush. I'd had
some difficulties in getting uploads to work until I tried using the excellent
ia CLI tool, which is packaged in
Debian.
In January 2022 I uploaded: two sets of multitracks from the 1981 album
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Brian Eno and David Byrne,
"A Secret Life" and
"Help Me Somebody";
28 cover disks from late 80s/early 90s issues of PC Plus, Pc Today, PC Zone
and Personal Computing; and...
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Russell Coker: First Flounder Meeting
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/02/01/first-flounder-meeting/
February 1, 2022, 10:09 AM
Based on a comment from my previous post [1] I have named the new FOSS group for Australia and NZ Flounder. Here is the link to the agenda for the first meeting [2].
I am currently using a DNS name in my own domain for the group, but in the near future I’ll move it to somewhere else under a zone I don’t control. My aim is not to have personal control but to create an organisation for the community. But at the moment I’m just doing things in the fastest way possible, I will setup HTTP redir...
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Junichi Uekawa: Already February.
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2022-Feb-1.html.en#2022-Feb-1-15:59:37
February 1, 2022, 6:59 AM
Already February. Surprising.
I've been practicing Rust every day and I am getting more comfortable with Rust the language now.
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: #35: apt install rstudio quarto
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/01/31#035_apt_install_rstudio_quarto
February 1, 2022, 3:32 AM
Welcome to the 35th post in the ravishingly rabiant R recommendations, or R4. Today’s post is about apt and R tools.
Many of us have been running RStudio off our local machines for as long as binaries have been provided. Which is by now probably a bit over a decade. Time flies.
And as nice it is to have matching binaries, in my case in the .deb format used on Debian or Ubuntu, it is wee bit a painful to manually download a file and then install it. Twice the pain if you are lucky enough to be ...
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Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities January 2022
http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2022/02/01/floss-activities/
February 1, 2022, 12:23 AM
Focus
This month I didn't have any particular focus.
I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
Changes
purple-discord:
remove code copy,
fix markdown
thermal_daemon:
gitignore,
drop code copy
libpst:
cleanup
project info,
URLs,
embedded copies,
Python build
circuitbreaker:
cleanup
(1
2)
ideviceunback:
cleanup
Debian package uploads:
pscan,
purple-discord,
sptag,
python-circuitbreaker
(1
2)
Debian wiki pages:
BSP,
Chromium,
DebianDay/2022,
DebianDay,
DebianScience/R,
Derivatives/Census/Ubunt...
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Ingo Juergensmann: XMPP and Mail Clients
https://blog.windfluechter.net/2022/01/31/xmpp-and-mail-clients/
January 31, 2022, 8:06 PM
I really like XMPP, but I’m a little unhappy about the current general situation of XMPP. I think XMPP could do better if there were some benefits of having an XMPP address. For me one of those benefits is to have the option to have just one address I need to communicate to others. If everything is in place and well-configured, a user can be reached by mail, XMPP and SIP (voice/video calls) by just one address.
To address this I would like to see XMPP support in mail clients (MUAs). So whe...
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Russ Allbery: Review: The Story of the Treasure Seekers
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/treasure-seekers.html
January 31, 2022, 4:00 AM
Review: The Story of the Treasure Seekers, by E. Nesbit

Publisher:
Amazon


Copyright:
1899


Printing:
May 2012


ASIN:
B0082ZBXSI


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
136

The Story of the Treasure Seekers was originally published in 1899
and is no longer covered by copyright. I read the free Amazon Kindle
version because it was convenient. My guess is that Amazon is
republishing the Project
Gutenberg version, but they only cr...
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Russell Coker: Links Jan 2022
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/01/30/links-jan-2022/
January 30, 2022, 2:56 AM
Washington Post has an interesting article on how gender neutral language is developing in different countries [1].
pimaker has an interesting blog post about how they wrote a RISCV CPU emulator to boot a Linux kernel in a pixel shader in the VR Chat platform [2].
ZD has an interesting article about the new Solo Bumblebee platform for writing EBPF programs to run inside the Linux kernel [3]. EBPF is an interesting platform and it’s good to have new tools to help people develop for it.
Big Thin...
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Abiola Ajadi: Debci- An introduction for beginners!
https://ajadi-abiola.github.io/blog/Think-about-your-audience
January 29, 2022, 10:25 PM
Hello again!
Been a minute! for this blog i will continue from my previous article where i explained Debci you can read more about it here.
In my previous article I mentioned Debci stands for Debian Continous Integration and it exist to make sure packages work currently after an update by testing all of the packages that have tests written in them to make sure it works and nothing is broken.
For my internship, I am working on improving the user experience through the UI of the debci site makin...
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Sylvestre Ledru: An update on rust/coreutils
https://sylvestre.ledru.info/blog/2022/01/29/an-update-on-rust-coreutils
January 29, 2022, 11:50 AM
TLDR: we are making progress on the Rust implementation of the GNU coreutils.
Well, it is an understatement to say my previous blog post interested many people. Many articles, blog posts and some podcasts talked about it! As we pushed coreutils 0.0.12 a few days ago and getting closer to the 10 000 stars on github, it is now time to give an update!
This has brought a lot of new contributors to this project. Instead of 30 to 60 patches per month, we jumped to 400 to 472 patches every month. Simil...
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Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 202 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-202-released/
January 28, 2022, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 202. This version includes the following changes:
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Don't fail if comparing a nonexistent file with a .pyc file (and add test).
(Closes: #1004312)
* Drop a reference in the manual page which claims the ability to compare
non-existent files on the command-line. This has not been possible since
version 32 which was released in September 2015. (Closes: #1004182)
* Add experimental support for ...
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Jonathan Dowland: Using an iPad for note-taking in talks
https://jmtd.net/log/uksystems21/ipad/
January 27, 2022, 9:39 PM
I've found that using a laptop during conference talks means you either
end up doing something else and missing important bits of the talk, or
at least look like you're doing something else. But it's extremely
helpful to be able to look up the person who is talking, or their project,
or expand an acronym that's mentioned or read around the subject.
At December's uksystems21 conference, I experimented with using an
iPad as a kind of compromise. Modern iOS versions let you split the
display betwe...
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Russ Allbery: Review: I Didn't Do the Thing Today
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-593-41914-6.html
January 27, 2022, 3:53 AM
Review: I Didn't Do the Thing Today, by Madeleine Dore

Publisher:
Avery


Copyright:
2022


ISBN:
0-593-41914-6


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
291

At least from my narrow view of it, the world of productivity self-help
literature is a fascinating place right now. The pandemic overturned
normal work patterns and exacerbated schedule inequality, creating vastly
different experiences for the people whose work continued to be in-person
an...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: td 0.0.6 on CRAN: Minor Bugfix
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/01/26#td_0.0.6
January 27, 2022, 12:32 AM
The td package for accessing the twelvedata API for financial data has been updated once more on CRAN and is now at version 0.0.6.
The release comes in response to an email from CRAN who noticed (via r-devel) that I was sloppy (in one spot, it turns out) with a logical expression resulting in an expression of length greather than one. Fixed by wrapping an all() around it—and the package was back at CRAN minutes later thanks to automated processing over their end.
The NEWS entry follows.
Chang...
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Michael Ablassmeier: Qemu backup on Debian Bullseye
https://abbbi.github.io//qmpbackup-blog/
January 27, 2022, 12:00 AM
In my last article i showed how to use the
new features included in Debian Bullseye to easily create backups of your
libvirt managed domains.
A few years ago as this topic came to my interest, i also implemented a rather
small utility (POC) to create full and incremental backups from standalone qemu
processes: qmpbackup
The workflow for this is a little bit different from the approach i have taken
with virtnbdbackup.
While with libvirt managed virtual machines, the libvirt API provides all
ne...
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Gunnar Wolf: Progvis — Now in Debian proper! (unstable)
https://gwolf.org/2022/01/progvis-now-in-debian-proper-unstable.html
January 26, 2022, 4:43 PM
Progvis finally made it into
Debian! What is it, you
ask? It is a great tool to teach about memory management and
concurrency.
I first saw progvis in the poster presentation his author, Filip
Strömbäck, did last year at the https://sigcse2021.sigcse.org/,
immediately recognizing it as a tool I wanted to use at my classes,
and being it free software, make it available for all interested
Debian users. Quoting from
https://storm-lang.org/index.php?q=06-Programs%2F01-Progvis.md:
This is a p...
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Timo Jyrinki: Unboxing Dell XPS 13 - openSUSE Tumbleweed alongside preinstalled Ubuntu
http://losca.blogspot.com/2022/01/unboxing-dell-xps-13-opensuse.html
January 26, 2022, 12:51 PM
A look at the 2021 model of Dell XPS 13 - available with Linux pre-installedI received a new laptop for work - a Dell XPS 13. Dell has been long famous for offering certain models with pre-installed Linux as a supported option, and opting for those is nice for moving some euros/dollars from certain PC desktop OS monopoly towards Linux desktop engineering costs. Notably Lenovo also offers Ubuntu and Fedora options on many models these days (like Carbon X1 and P15 Gen 2). Obviously a smooth,...
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Russell Coker: Australia/NZ Linux Meetings
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/01/26/australia-nz-linux-meetings/
January 26, 2022, 6:44 AM
I am going to start a new Linux focused FOSS online meeting for people in Australia and nearby areas. People can join from anywhere but the aim will be to support people in nearby areas.
To cover the time zone range for Australia this requires a meeting on a weekend, I’m thinking of the first Saturday of the month at 1PM Melbourne/Sydney time, that would be 10AM in WA and 3PM in NZ. We may have corner cases of daylight savings starting and ending on different days, but that shouldn’t be a bi...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.10.8.1.0 on CRAN: Upstream Updates
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/01/25#rcpparmadillo_0.10.8.1.0
January 25, 2022, 8:33 PM
Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language–and is widely used by (currently) 950 other packages on CRAN, downloaded over 22.9 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint/vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 451 times ac...
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Matthieu Caneill: Debsources, python3, and funky file names
http://matthieu.io/blog/2022/01/24/debsources-python3-funky-file-names/
January 23, 2022, 11:00 PM
Rumors are running that python2 is not a thing anymore.
Well, I'm certainly late to the party, but I'm happy to report that
sources.debian.org is now running python3.
Wait, it wasn't?
Back when development started, python3 was very much a real language, but it was
hard to adopt because it was not supported by many libraries. So python2 was
chosen, meaning print-based debugging was used in lieu of print()-based
debugging, and str were bytes, not unicode.
And things were working just fine. O...
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Antoine Beaupré: Switching from OpenNTPd to Chrony
https://anarc.at/blog/2022-01-23-chrony/
January 23, 2022, 9:55 PM
A friend recently reminded me of the existence of chrony, a
"versatile implementation of the Network Time Protocol (NTP)". The
excellent introduction is worth quoting in full:
It can synchronise the system clock with NTP servers, reference
clocks (e.g. GPS receiver), and manual input using wristwatch and
keyboard. It can also operate as an NTPv4 (RFC 5905) server and peer
to provide a time service to other computers in the network.
It is designed to perform well in a wide range of conditions,
...
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Louis-Philippe Véronneau: Goodbye Nexus 5
https://veronneau.org/goodbye-nexus-5.html
January 23, 2022, 5:00 AM
I've blogged a few times already about my Nexus 5, the Android device I
have/had been using for 8 years. Sadly, it died a few weeks ago, when the WiFi
chip stopped working. I could probably have attempted a mainboard swap, but at
this point, getting a new device seemed like the best choice.
In a world where most Android devices are EOL after less than 3 years, it is
amazing I was able to keep this device for so long, always running the latest
Android version with the latest security patch. The N...
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Steve Kemp: Visiting the UK was difficult, but worth it
https://blog.steve.fi/visiting_the_uk_was_difficult__but_worth_it.html
January 22, 2022, 10:00 AM
So in my previous post I mentioned that we were going to spend the Christmas period in the UK, which we did.
We spent a couple of days there, meeting my parents, and family. We also persuaded my sister to drive us to Scarborough so that we could hang out on the beach for an afternoon.
Finland has lots of lakes, but it doesn't have proper waves. So it was surprisingly good just to wade in the sea and see waves! Unfortunately our child was a wee bit too scared to ride on a donkey!
Unfortunat...
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Louis-Philippe Véronneau: Homebrewing recipes
https://veronneau.org/homebrewing-recipes.html
January 22, 2022, 5:00 AM
Looking at my blog, it seems I haven't written anything about homebrewing in a
while. In fact, the last time I did was when I had a carboy blow out on
me in the middle of the night...
Fear not, I haven't stopped brewing since then. I have in fact decided to
publish my homebrew recipes. Not on this blog though, as it would get pretty
repetitive.
So here are my recipes. So far, I've brewed around 30 different
beers!
The format is pretty simple (no fancy HTML, just plain markdown) and although
I'm ...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: qlcal 0.0.2 on CRAN: Updates
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/01/21#qlcal-r_0.0.2
January 22, 2022, 3:03 AM
The second release of the still fairly new qlcal package arrivied at CRAN today.
qlcal is based on the calendaring subset of QuantLib. It is provided (for the R package) as a set of included files, so the package is self-contained and does not depend on an external QuantLib library (which can be demanding to build). qlcal covers over sixty country / market calendars and can compute holiday lists, its complement (i.e. business day lists) and much more.
This release brings a further package simpli...
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Neil McGovern: Further investments in desktop Linux
https://blog.halon.org.uk/2022/01/further-investments-in-desktop-linux/
January 21, 2022, 3:31 PM
This was originally posted on the GNOME Foundation news feed
The GNOME Foundation was supported during 2020-2021 by a grant from Endless Network which funded the Community Engagement Challenge, strategy consultancy with the board, and a contribution towards our general running costs. At the end of last year we had a portion of this grant remaining, and after the success of our work in previous years directly funding developer and infrastructure work on GTK and Flathub, we wanted to see whethe...
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Louis-Philippe Véronneau: Montreal Subway Foot Traffic Data, 2021 edition
https://veronneau.org/montreal-subway-foot-traffic-data-2021-edition.html
January 21, 2022, 5:00 AM
For the third time now, I've asked Société de Transport de Montréal,
Montreal's transit agency, for the foot traffic data of Montreal's subway. I
think this has become an annual thing now :)
The original blog post and the 2019-2020 edition can be read here:
Original blog post (2001 to 2018)
2019-2020 edition (2001 to 2020)
By clicking on a subway station, you'll be redirected to a graph of the
station's foot traffic.
Orange line (top10)
Green line (top10)
Blue line
Yellow line
Global Top ...
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Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 201 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-201-released/
January 21, 2022, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 201. This version includes the following changes:
[ Chris Lamb ]
* If the debian.deb822 module raises any exception on import, re-raise it as
an ImportError instead. This should fix diffoscope on some Fedora systems.
Thanks to Mattia Rizzolo for suggesting this particular solution.
(Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#300)
[ Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek ]
* Fix json detection with file-5.41-3.fc36.x86...
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Sven Hoexter: Running OpenWRT x86 in qemu
http://sven.stormbind.net/blog/posts/deb_qemu_local_openwrt/
January 20, 2022, 8:20 PM
Sometimes it's nice for testing purpose to have the OpenWRT
userland available locally. Since there is an x86 build
available one can just run it within qemu.
wget https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/21.02.1/targets/x86/64/openwrt-21.02.1-x86-64-generic-squashfs-combined.img.gz
gunzip openwrt-21.02.1-x86-64-generic-squashfs-combined.img.gz
qemu-img convert -f raw -O qcow2 openwrt-21.02.1-x86-64-generic-squashfs-combined.img openwrt-21.02.1.qcow2
qemu-img resize openwrt-21.02.1.qcow2 200M
qem...
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Caleb Adepitan: I'm Thinking About You Right Now!
https://chainofcommand.hashnode.dev/im-thinking-about-you-right-now
January 20, 2022, 10:17 AM
Just in case you stumbled on this incidentally and you wonder “Who in the seven fat worlds is this mysterious...?” Ha! That was what I was thinking about you you were thinking about me. You gerrit!?
I heard you listening to my thoughts; I listened to yours too. I wonder if you heard me too.
I will like to talk, today, about what it is I do at Debian as an Outreachy Intern under the JavaScript team. I woke up this morning and decided to bore you with so much details. I must have woken up glor...
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Russ Allbery: DocKnot 7.01
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2022-01/004.html
January 20, 2022, 5:17 AM
Continuing to flush out bugs in the recent changes to my static web site
generator.
I had missed some Unicode implications for how output from external
programs was handled, and also missed Unicode decoding of the output from
Pod::Thread, since Pod::Simple always encodes its output even if that
output is to a scalar. I also missed an implication for how symlinks were
handled in Path::Iterator::Rule, causing docknot spin to fail to
copy files into the output tree that were symlinks in the inp...
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Joerg Jaspert: Funny CPU usage
https://blog.ganneff.de/2022/01/funny-cpu-usage.html
January 19, 2022, 8:56 PM
Munin plugin and it’s CPU usage (shell fixup)
So at work we do have a munin server running, and one of
the graphs we do for every system is a network statistics one with a
resolution of 1 second. That’s a simple enough script to have, and it
is working nicely - on 98% of our machines. You just don’t notice the
data gatherer at all, so that we also have some other graphs done with
a 1 second resolution. For some, this really helps.
Basics
The basic code for this is simple. There is a bun...
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Joey Hess: encountered near the start of a new chapter
http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/encountered_near_the_start_of_a_new_chapter/
January 18, 2022, 1:01 AM